Mustache Family on the Move Next Week

Hooray, it’s time for another one of our roadtrips. The schools will be throwing out all the kids for the holidays, so we figured we’d take our own son out for another real-world geography lesson for the next ten days or so.

We’ll be leaving on Saturday and driving South to Santa Fe, New Mexico for a couple of days, then moving further Southwest to the Phoenix, Arizona area for some hiking, exploring, warm weather, and other neat things that the city has to offer. Not to mention swimming and hottubbing and luxury-resort-hotel-squatting.

You see, various Travelocity credit card rewards points and discounts happened to align perfectly directly under the watchful eye of Mrs. Money Mustache, so we ended up booking a week in this very opulent resort in Scottsdale for virtually no cash out of the pocket. It was an offer we couldn’t refuse, since all of us love visiting the warm deserts in the winter anyway. To complement the frugal nature of this little vacation, we’ll probably take the little car instead of the van, saving a good chunk of fuel over the 1800 mile round trip.

If you happen to live in the Santa Fe or Phoenix/Scottsdale areas and might want to get together, drop me some words! It would be fun to meet some locals and get the inside scoop on these nice cities. We could arrange a bike ride, or a hike, or a feast or beer drinking event depending on your style.

Blog activity will of course be unpredictable during this time. But there are a few ideas moving along for stories that need to be written up:

We’re getting really close to completing the “foreclosure project” renovation, and there were lots of neat experiences that need to be described there. Fixing up a very old house is always a real can of worms – a mixture of neat opportunities and annoying inconveniences. But right now it is time to whip up a nice marketing page about the property to be posted on Craigslist for rental, since we hope to find a tenant sometime in January.

I just finished reading a book on investing called, “The Intelligent Asset Allocator” by William Bernstein. I also have a newer book he wrote called, “The Four Pillars of Investing” which I’ll bring to read on the trip. Why all the stock market books? Because I might be selling my current overly-pricey rental house within the next year or so, and splitting the proceeds between smaller rental houses or some sort of multi-unit, combined with putting much more back into stocks and other financial instruments – with an eye towards things like dividend income and stable performance rather than just capital gains. I want as much knowledge on these options as possible before taking the plunge. (Hey Dividend Mantra – if you are reading this would you be interested in writing a guest posting for us on the fundamentals of dividend investing?)

Also on the book tip, I’m writing up a “Reading List” page for this blog where we can start keeping track of good books. It will start with just the books I’ve read recently that seemed worthwhile including the ones already reviewed, plus the books that readers have recommended strongly to me which I plan to read in the near future. Then we can expand it from there. The main idea is to have an easy link at the top of the website that should allow the newer readers to catch up on everything we’ve been learning for the last year.

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I just finished reading “The Four Pillars of Investing” myself. Bernstein really tells a compelling story in there. If anything, it makes you realize how farcical many of the “experts” out there really are. He does a nice statistical analysis of the performance of various fund managers and shows that the group performance is actually just slightly worse that a distribution you would expect from random chance (and that is before they charge fees). The short-term-successful (and even some long term, chance says given 100,000+ experts a small handful are going to be consistently lucky) investment “leaders” are really just “lucky”.

That alone makes a compelling foundation (Pillar?) for his main point about indexing and whole market diversification being a reasonable approach to investing for most people.

It also has an entertaining section about the history of markets going back to Roman times and before.

Anyways, have fun on your trip, “Four Pillars” is a much easier read than “Asset Allocator” so it should work for a vacation read.

Awesome! That would be splendid, Bob. You can contact us through the “Contact” link at the top and we can figure out a day/time to meet.

Camelback mountain looks like it might be good for the kiddo (he loves to scramble!), although he would probably be fine on the other one too. He’s pretty good with hikes, as long as there is a fun trail (not flat and not paved/gravel) and it is 3 miles or less found trip.

Great time to come to Scottsdale! There is some great shopping to be had! We’ve got a great route planned; First to Scottsdale Fashion Square then the Brigada shopping plaza and then to Kierland Commons. We could make a pit stop at the BMW or Porsche dealership before heading to Desert Ridge to end a shopping spree bonanza! JK!

But really Scottsdale & Phoenix have great bike paths and parks if you guys are considering bringing your bikes or we could let the kids run around on the playground? I sent you a message through the ‘contact’ link if you are interested in getting together!

I do know about scheduling posts, of course – I do it every time I finish an article! But I’ve been a slacker of late and don’t have any finished ones ready to go. We’re on the just-in-time delivery system for now. Or the not-in-time. But that doesn’t matter, because this is just an amateur blog and not a professional one. There is no schedule. It helps to reinforce the retirement lifestyle vibe :-)

There’s a pizza place in Phoenix (Pizzeria Bianco, 623 E Adams St., Phoenix) that is one of the best in the nation. I’ve been trying to think of reasons to go to Phoenix just to try one of their pizza’s but haven’t gone yet. There’s also Grimaldi’s with ties to the famous Grimaldi’s in NYC under the Brookly bridge. I had my first ‘real’ pizza this summer in New York and ever since I’ve been on a quest to find great pizza (I’ve even made a wood fired pizza oven).

HI. I LOVE your blog. I want to know more about credit cards and rewards points. I’d love to figure out how to get free travel. Are you using the American Express Travelocity card? I just looked it up online. My husband keeps saying we need to get a credit card that gives rewards points.

Yup – the travelocity amex one is a good one as long as you travel enough to use up the points you earn. When you do the math, it works out to a 10% rebate on travel (flights, hotels, rental cars) purchased through travelocity and 2% on everything else.

There is a $25 annual fee that kicked in after the first year, which I might call and waive this year – but considering how the card saves us $400-$1000 per year because of some special situations involving buying plane tickets on behalf of family members and for business, the $25 is worthwhile for us.

Wow, hey…thanks for the shout-out! It’s much appreciated. I’d love to put something together. Maybe a “dividend investing 101”? I’ll start putting something together this weekend and shoot you an email.

Have fun on the trip and enjoy it. Sounds like one of the many luxuries of ERE/FI…to take a nice family trip like that.

Is this the same rental house that your currently fixing up, or do you have another rental house? I support the dividend investing model, something I try to follow myself although we are just starting out on that road.

The Bernstein books are good. If you get into portfolio theory (which is what he basically describes somewhat repetitively in both books), another recommendation is David Swensen’s “Unconventional Success.” It is pretty dry but thoughtful. Unless I missed it, I think the concept of rebalancing is somewhat underrepresented in what you’ve written so far.

Your thoughts have really broadened my perspective on wealth creation (more so than my overpriced mba) – really appreciate it and keep up the good work.

Damn! If only I had discovered MMM a few months ago instead of a week ago, I would have been around to go hiking and beer-drinking too!

Maybe the Uncephalized Tribe will have to make a trip up to CO one of these years… as soon as we finish paying off our very un-Mustachian credit card debt (it’s shrinking rapidly and yes, I am living on almost nothing but beans, rice, oats, bananas and eggs until it’s gone!) and have a decent ‘Stash to call our own. :-)

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